When
feminism trumps racial sensitivity the results can be a cultural jam.
In a review of the recently released and incredibly controversial Melbourne
film, The Jammed, David Stratton claimed that the film was in the ‘great
tradition of socially conscious thrillers’, as the film broaches
the relatively uncharted issue the sex trafficking industry in Australia’s
urban centres.

According
to Australia’s most celebrated critical film duo, Margaret and
David, the film was impressive as its authenticity and ability to demonstrate
‘the fact that this is happening in this country’ and that
is not ‘manufactured’ solidifies the film’s claim
to truth. Similarly, at The Age, Victoria’s self-proclaimsed
‘newspaper of the year’, enfant terrible of film criticism
Jim
Schembri, who was instrumental in the film’s promotion, states
that ‘every frame of the film breathes with authenticity’
and that the film’s strength comes from the way it ‘uses
the conventions of genre as a narrative template to tell a unique, and
uniquely Australian, story’. There was a criticism of the funding
bodies that did not contribute to the film’s production, as well
as to the film festivals that did not screen a film that ‘deserves
to be seen by everyone’. Clearly, the respectability of The Jammed,
championed by our country’s cultural elite, which has generated
interest in the film and helped to lock in an unexpectedly successful
distribution deal, derives very much from the film’s brave subject
matter, its social awareness and intention to represent something that
is true, that is authentic, that is happening in the very heartland
of urban Australia, and that Australia needs to know about it.

Yet a
paradox exists through the conflation of the role of authenticity and
that of genre in film. Genre works to construct conventions based around
recognisable stereotypes. Authenticity insinuates a sense of realism
in the way that what is being presented on the screen is, essentially,
true. To problematise the film’s claim to authenticity is not
to undermine the seriousness of the situation of sex trafficking itself,
but rather to question the now outdated notion that cinema is reflection
of reality, a window onto a world of truth, rather than a textually
mediated representation. What becomes problematic by such critical acclaim
is the way in which it does not necessarily reflect how marketing a
film such as The Jammed through a discourse of authenticity
works to reinforce specific generic stereotypes that are then consumed
as truth by its audience, especially in relation to gender, race and
class.

Set in
Melbourne, the film follows Ashley, described by director Dee McLachlan
as ‘a normal Melbourne girl’, apolitical in nature and apathetic
to concerns for anything beyond finding an appropriate husband. Through
chance, Ashley is enlisted by a non-English speaking woman straight
from China, Sunni, to help find Sunni’s daughter Rubi, who Sunni
believes may be working as a prostitute. The film spirals into the seedy
underworld of the sex trade industry, and Ashley is soon consumed by
her desire to rescue Rubi from her captors. In the process, two others
are introduced into the narrative, a young Chinese woman, Crystal (Emma
Lung) and a young Russian woman, Vanya, both also trapped in the prostitution
ring. With the help of her ex-boyfriend, Ashley manages to free the
girls. In the process however, Rubi commits suicide, Crystal ends up
in a detention centre and only the Russian Vanya remains free, running
into the night. The mythology behind The Jammed’s creation
is based around the story that the director wrote the script after reading
a newspaper article about a prostitution ring of sex slaves in Kew.
This is mentioned in almost all of the film’s numerous reviews,
and the story’s authenticity is confirmed in its opening intertitles
that tell us that it is based on a true story.

Undoubtedly,
the film raises some very real concerns. It reflects upon the apathetic
and apolitical nature of many Australians involved in the daily grind.
It critiques the willingness to ignore the injustices inflicted upon
those around us. It condemns the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers
in detention. And it reveals the complicity of men and women from all
the echelons of society in sustaining sex slavery as an industry. But,
by inscribing a notion of authenticity into the narrative through appropriations
of real events, the obvious desire to present the ‘truth’
formulates specific and often damaging cultural and sexual stereotypes
that breed certain hegemonic values.

What is
lost in both the film-as-text as well as the extra-textual debate surrounding
it is a thorough investigation into the racialised representations of
women. The Jammed’s heroine Ashley becomes exemplary
of a global womanism, in which the white, heterosexual Australian woman
is duty bound to save non-Western women from the sex-trade industry.
The problem with such representations is that it conforms to two particular
stereotypes, that of the civilised, Western subject and that of the
primitive victimised non-Western Other.

The film
reinforces such stereotypes through its depiction of Asian cultures
as maintaining inherently different values, but without any engagement
with the complexities of cultural difference in an increasingly transnational
milieu. This is most emphatically exemplified at the audience’s
shocked realisation that Rubi’s mother, who Ashley has been helping
to find her lost daughter, actually sold Rubi for money in China. Rubi’s
previous scenes of emotional trauma and uncontrollable crying in her
bedroom have taken on new meaning. She is crying not for her longing
for home, but for her awareness that she has no home to go to. The significance
of this moment is that it works to assuage any guilt about the harmful
Western influences on the rest of the world. In claiming to be an authentic
representation of the situation, but without engaging with a more complex
understanding of the cultural, political and economic conditions within
the countries concerned, nor the role of the West in shaping their economies,
the film presents Sunni in such a way that only reaffirms the worst
Asian stereotypes in Australia.

Whilst
the film implicates White Australians as the profiteers of the sex-trade
industry, most of the film’s acts of rape and violence are performed
by Asian men. If white male brutality is enacted at all, it is represented
solely through the acts of an uneducated lower class. White Australian
masculinity is salvaged through the role of Tom, the sympathetic, on-off
boyfriend of Ashley, who contributes to the ‘saving’ of
the girls and confirms the dominance of both middle-class Australian
values and the hetero-normative relationship structure at the film’s
conclusion.

In some
ways the Russian character Vanya escapes such blatant othering. Her
English is better, she is spared the naivety of the Asian girls and
is more successful in actively seeking to change her situation. It is
Vanya who calls Ashley to tell her where the missing Rubi can be located,
who allows herself to be captured in place of the others, who spitefully
embarrasses the brothel owner in front of a crowd of affected bourgeoisie,
and who steals back the money she is owed. But through Vanya’s
‘choice’ at the film’s end to run off into the night
and assumedly to continue working the streets, the film imparts upon
her a judgement of promiscuity associated with her ethnicity. Her decision
to reject the wholesome life and feminist values offered by Ashley is
completely unfathomable and yet, so typical.

This signifies
a danger faced by films attempting to address both racial and gender
issues: the tendency is that one set of values will trump all others.
Namely it is issues of gender and feminism that are considered the bastions
of justice itself. For many global womanists, male and female, in countries
such as Australia, it is difficult to comprehend that women of different
ethnicities identify racial concerns as ‘as important’ if
not ‘more important’ than feminist values championed by
the West. That is not to say that there is no place for feminism globally,
but that feminism as white solipsism, which ignores the importance of
cultural and social difference, and thus is really performing another
act of Western hegemony, a kind of neo-colonialism of specific gendered
values.

In films
like The Jammed, whilst non-Western naivety and poor conditions
can only produce dangerous situations for those who cannot take care
of themselves, Western values save the day. The heroine is not the brave
Crystal or the sassy Vanya, but rather the young, (a)pathetic Ashley.
Yet, as Ashley becomes consumed by the story, she also becomes a product
to be consumed by the film’s audience, of old and exhausted stereotypes
that have continued to justify the domination of Western ways of thinking
over their non-Western counterparts.

The assumption
that The Jammed works as a kind of feminist critique of the
real way in which society ‘transnationally’ operates at
the expense of women needs to be revised. It is important that as we
consider the myriad complexities involved in racial and gendered representations,
and the problems of reading cinema as truth. Not to do so will not help
those suffering from the remnants of transnational exchange but rather
will obscure many of the important cultural differences faced by women
of the non-Western world under the imperialist flag of global womanism.